Last week, the upgrade to Ubuntu 11 severely broke all carefully selected menu colors, graphics settings and icon sets. I gave up the fight after a few hours of effortless restoration work and switched to Linux Mint 11.

While setting up my machine and restoring the links to the company Windows file servers I could not connect. The password window would re-appear without any feedback. The fix was even stranger than the problem.

Ok, fist of all: DO NOT DOWNLOAD WUBI 9.10 as it contains a serious GRUB2 problem which will give you some headaches if you’re new to Linux. Why I’m saying this? I just ran into this GRUB2 problem while installing the new Wubi 9.10. Here’s what I did:

Downloaded Wubi 9.10 windows installer and ran it.

Installer downloads stuff, and boots into Ubuntu installer

After reboot, GRUB screen comes up with a loud beep and a prompt. Great.

Some googling finds a lot of Linux voodoo talking l33tspe4king nerds, but it did contain some info with which I managed to get things working:

Follow these steps to create an Ubuntu Linux “server” running a Postgres database which allows non-local connections. You will need a machine with at least 10GB HD, bootable from CD-ROM, network card, and preferably more than 200MB RAM. Other than that, it can even be a Mac G4 if you like (just download the correct Ubuntu build).